Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(48)

I’ve been told it’s actually kind of a crapshoot that December will bring a bunch of snow to Ohio, but the natives keep telling me we’re due for a white Christmas, and so I’m hoping.

There are only a few little snowflakes now, but even a handful of snowflakes, spread out in the wind all over a big city, still means it’s snowing.

Snowfall.

Even though the vision I have left is twenty-twenty, my visual field has narrowed, and my night vision is grainy with little acuity and full of interlocking halos radiating from artificial light sources.

I can see, but I am told my diagnosis means I’m going blind.

It’s like how at first, when a snowflake finds its way to rest on the pointed top of a fence board, melting a little because it is all by itself, we say it is snowing, but everything in our neighborhood still looks the same.

The pointy boards of the fence still point, the bare trees zigzag their branches all across the pale sky, all the patio furniture we never bothered to bring in is still exposed on its lonely patio.

Then, three or four new snowflakes join their pioneer on the fence, and because they can huddle together for cold, they don’t melt. They can make a little cold spot for another three snowflakes, until there is a soft pile, like spilled sugar.

One snowflake at a time, the pointy boards of the fence grow soft, the branches of the trees round with drifts, the patio furniture disappears into white and indistinct humps and caves.

I draw a six-pointed snowflake in the fog of my breath on the bus window.

One snowflake at a time for the world you thought knew to transform.

Unrecognizable.

At first, it’s snowing, and then, while you aren’t looking, snowfall.

The world you knew is still there, but it’s hidden.

Campus and home have been enough, for me, this winter. I wrote to C, last night, curled in the dark, his words glowing under the glass of my screen.

He wants to know why I’m not getting out more. Why I’m always available to chat in the evenings. He isn’t, always, and then he’ll tell me about a concert I had vaguely heard about, or some community locavore dinner, or a movie.

Sometimes, Bob or one of my other lab colleagues will invite me out at the end of the day. I got a lot of invitations, at first. Which, actually, I’m surprised how many I turned down. I like bars. I like people. I like outdoor concerts and cookouts and trying new restaurants. Mom and I had a membership to all the museums in Seattle, the zoo even, just so we could go whenever we felt like it and see one thing.

Sometimes you just want to look at lemurs. Or one Monet. Or sit in a listening booth at the Experience Music Project and try to figure out Bob Dylan. Which is impossible, by the way.

Everyone has told me that there is a good museum here. C went to the Rothko exhibit, the Andy Warhol one, too, with the giant, silver, balloon clouds.

The closest C and I ever got to meeting each other was when an Annie Leibovitz installation came to the gallery on campus, hundreds of her photographs and serials of her proofs, and for several breath-holding minutes, we talked in hypotheticals about that installation because, of course, meeting on campus was nothing.

Safe as houses.

It was photography, and we talked about his pictures all the time.

Then, the hypotheticals drifted away, scrolled up the screen, and disappeared.

He didn’t talk about the installation, later, after he had surely been to see it.

As if we had stood the other up and couldn’t speak of it, when really, I had not let him quite ask me so that I wouldn’t have to either reject him or accept.

He knows I am a new member of the Lakefield State research faculty, but that’s all. He hasn’t asked what I research and I haven’t told him. I know he works somewhere on campus, and that he likes his job, but he hasn’t told me what it is.

Or at least, I change the subject when I’m worried he’s getting close to saying something that will release him from my computer.

He wants to know why I’m not comfortable going out, and because I won’t tell him, he worries it’s because I’m shy or not adjusting well.

Because we don’t really talk about our day, not exactly.

More and more, he’s told me about these things that he’s done—the concerts and the new restaurants, and the events.

When he does, I try to get him to talk about his photographs. Or I tell him the room is dark.

I don’t tell him exactly how dark it gets, nowadays, how that scares me. How I’ll look at the time on the laptop again and again, certain it must be later, and it’s still early and I’ll realize, looking at the living-room windows and the giant halo around them, the distorted ring my night blindness refracts a light source into, that there is still enough residual evening light that I should be able to see better.